Invisible Mac-specific files can be extremely annoying when you transfer Zip files to other systems. Windows and Linux make these files visible and they could create confusion to recipients that receive your files. Compress Files lets you specify if you want to omit Finder specific information (such as the .DS_Store files) and Mac specific file attributes (such as a resource fork) when creating Zip archives.

For high security, you can use Compress Files to encrypt part of your hard disk through the use of an encrypted disk image protected with a password. You can then also email this disk image to other people who know the password. The image will show up as a volume on your desktop. When your Keychain is locked, or when you send that disk image file to another person, the image is secure. When your Keychain is unlocked, you can copy, move and delete files as you would on any normal hard disk.

What's new in Compress Files

Version 5.0.2:

Fixes an issue with progress indicators and fixes an issue with tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives creation.

This application works well and I have not experience any bugs or malfunctions. The price of Compress Files 5.0 is a little steep when you compare it other available applications such as sArchiver 2.5.6 ($15.00) or BetterZip 1.8.3 ($19.95). Both sArchiver 2.5.6 and BetterZip 1.8.3 offer decompression of many commonly used file formats, segmented/split file compression for large files, and the ability to preview content of archives without extracting it.
Compress Files 5.0 does offer contextual menu support for pre Snow Leopard users and service menu support for Snow Leopard users which makes compressing a file very convenient. I noticed that the Compress Files 5.0 dos not offer all the options under service menu that it does under the contextual menu options. For example under contextual menu options you cloud choose compress to a 7z file , compress to a 7z encrypted file, or compress to a 7z file and send it as attachment to a new Mac Mail message. The service menu options is missing the encrypted and the ability to attachment to a new Mac Mail message options for all of the supported formats. The of the absence of the attachment to a new Mac Mail message slow ones work flow dramatically.
Compress Files 5.0 does not allow to you choose the level of encryption for DMG images. At this price point I believe this option should have included.

When I make an encrypted disk image. I do not get a password dialog. It makes the .dmg but the pass is blank so no info needed to open the encrypted disk image. All other options are working 100%.
Mac OS X 10.4.9
INTEL
G5